Re: [fd-dev] Dosemu

[Day Brown]

Windoz, and to a lesser, but significant extent, Linux, shows that it is easier to add features than it is to squash bugs. Multiuser would not hurt were this not so; but part of the reliability of dos is that you do only have one thing running, and if it crashes, you have a much better idea of where to look.

Given DTR speeds of 10 to 100meg/sec and that few dos apps run even 1 meg, You can load/unload dos apps faster than a multitasking gui can open and close background 'running' apps. but of course, it mostly depends on what you want to do. If it is read and type like now in ascii doing email, dos is faster. But if you need to work with multimedia, by all means use Linux.

However, I think that the global market in single user text apps is sufficient to support dos. If you are working with text, why would you not want the typicaly 98% of screen area instead of the small windows which gui offers?

Were Freedos to offer a text mode ansi color scrollbar email tool and a fully functional graphic surf tool to display webpages like Mozilla, it would be much more than a small niche market. Especially given the ongoing threat of sabotage software from the online interface.I am hardput to think of anything out there that does not rely on the background of a multitasking os to wreak havoc.

Altho, as it is, running Linux Mozilla online, and then having my personal text work on a dos drive is an even more robust kind of firewall that I cannot fathom how it could be breached.

BUt, if we want to see the net more available to the vast masses of poor people, a simple dos based surf tool would run better on the kind of limited hardware and electric power peasants would be able to get. The statline ansi color pulldown scrollbar menu system of dos text editors like DEXTER, (DR.EXE) is much more developed than anything I've seen in Linux; the text mode editors still think I have a mono monitor, and the gui ones lack even more of the functionality. I've not been able to find any Linux tool which will split the screen vertically, and make changing panels like you can with MC (linux file mgr) or DR.EXE. But Dexter is not an office WYSIWYG tool for putting out memos or letters in a zillion fonts. But if you want to work with long texts or source code, it is gonzo faster on limited hardware.

I've not seen any file manager with all the functionality of Directory Wizard (DW.EXE), but then again, most Linux users dont move files around nearly as much as I do, or bother copying critical data to a dos drive. MC gives you that one statline with F1 thru F10 options. DW gives you that series, but also two more menus opened up with the ctrl & alt keys and an 'Fx'. And lets you install macros or hotkey for other uses.

Given a much more complex file tree and much more hanging on it, it is no wonder that 'FIND filename' in Linux takes forever compared to FF.EXE in dos, which is prolly on a much smaller drive.

I dont really know what most users do with, or want from, their computers; I only hear from the people who have trouble. But one thing I think we'd all agree with, is that they'd have less of it if they werent running windoz. I expect that most of them will figure this out in a few more years, and whenever new systems get installed or sold, it will be Linux with perhaps a dos partition in case of trouble. Hardware support people would have a much easier time if the user could logon in dos and provide the readouts on the status of the system independant of any problems the operating system might have.

I see that increasingly, systems are left on all the time; I also see that there are memory management problems which arise out of the multi-tasking in which apps, even when closed, dont give back all the dram they've been using. You can avoid that problem with dos. Even when the app is not coded properly, you can use pc-mag's MARK.COM & RELEASE.COM to tag memory, and dump anything, no matter what it is, or why it it is there. hmmm.. does the Linux terminal have anything like WAITASEC.COM? and why didnt they set it up so you could hit the 'print screen' button during boot to get a hardcopy of error messages?

One last thing dos will be around for is the same reason you can still buy black and white camera film. I recently saw the 'BB.EXE' text mode demo, a fine example of ASCII art, a tradition going all the way back to line printers. People routinely see the Linux penguin during boot in ANSI color, and there are many other expressions of this tradition which will be around forever. Few people who saw the movie, 'The Matrix' knew that the falling green letters on a computer screen was what many of us, who first started working with text on screen saw... when it crashed.

Dos is, like Film Noir, oil paint, or clay, an artistic medium. It is the main reason I sub here, to get tipped off to tools that I might use in my own artistic endeavors in the medium.

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